Building Personal Resilience for you and your teams

In order to work and function well, you (and your teams if you are a manager) need to be resilient and open to change in order to deal with workplace challenges. Increasingly, we are working and managing in uncertain and pressured times, where what we need to deliver and how we need to deliver it can change quickly.

If we do not know how to deal with pressure and high levels of change, then our quality of life and work suffers. When we do not know how to share these difficulties, this also increases the pressure. The course will help you to understand how you respond to pressure and what your personal preferences are for dealing with difficult situations. It will also provide you with a toolkit to deal with the tough times, and help you to prevent challenging situations becoming worse.

Who will benefit from attending?

Anyone who wants to know how to deal better with pressure (ie not just carrying on in the same way), or is concerned that their team is finding the work or environment too demanding.

Learning outcomes

Understand what resilience is and how to make sure you have it

Develop a toolkit to help you through challenging times

Help your team or those around you deal with pressure

Reduce your risk of stress and burn-out

Organisational benefit

Individuals and teams will find it easier to share issues, and to support others in an open way. This will increase overall productivity and contribute to an open culture. Reduced risk of burn-out to individuals and teams.

Agenda

09:15 Registration

09:30 Welcome and setting the scene

Introductions

Expectations for the day

10.00 What is resilience and why do we need it?

We will look at the situations where we are under pressure or strain and the individual differences in how we respond to those situations. We will look at the difference between being resilient and pretending that everything is fine.

10.30 How resilient do you feel now and when is the challenge greatest?

This is a chance to look in more depth about when you feel most under pressure and what are your own personal trigger points. This is the starting point for working out the best coping strategies.

What creates pressure and stress?

We will look at how stress is created and what happens to us physically and emotionally under pressure. What happens if this is sustained over a period of time?

11.00 Break

11.15The Resilience toolkit

We will cover a range of tools and techniques to help you to build your own resilience toolkit. We will cover some physical techniques to help with pressure but we will also cover longer term strategies that can help you to create healthy boundaries and stop things getting into a difficult state.

12.30 Lunch

13.15 The truth will out – having difficult conversations

Sometimes we need to have difficult conversations in order to move things forward, but this can feel intimidating. By ignoring them and delaying them we increase the pressure. We will look at techniques to make these conversations focused and productive, without the fear factor. Often it is the fact that organisations feel they can’t discuss things openly that creates a lot of the stress for individuals.

14.00 Choosing where to focus

Some practical exercises that help us with: prioritisation, saying ‘No’, focusing on what’s really going on, and helping others to do the same.

Dealing with setbacks and challenges

When things go ‘wrong’ the temptation is to blame ourselves and this takes time and energy away from what we are trying to achieve. We will look at more productive ways of dealing with setbacks which are less personal and allow us to move on more quickly

14.45 The importance of relationships and perspective

Our colleagues, team and managers can and should be a great support network, but often we feel that we should do all the looking after of others, rather than it being a network of support. We will look at how to have two-way relationships at work so that the times of high pressure are shared or at least understood by all.

Creating an action plan

We will use all the learning to put together a personal action plan which will enable you to be more resilient, and to help those around you to do the same.

This will be tailored to your own personal stress points and your own chosen methods for handling them in the future.